Christian saints have been the objects of reverence and fascination throughout the past two millennia. Their likenesses, heroic acts, prayerful lives, and stories of martyrdom have been portrayed frequently in art of diverse media. Without familiarity with the saints and their images and symbols, viewers of art may find it challenging to identify, for example, which saint is represented as a monk with an axe through his head, or a beautiful girl holding a wheel, or a woman carrying her eyes on a plate.

This sumptuously illustrated volume analyzes artists' representations of angels and demons and heaven and hell from the Judeo-Christian tradition and describes how these artistic portrayals evolved over time. As with other books in the Guide to Imagery series, the goal of this volume is to
help contemporary art enthusiasts decode the symbolic meanings in the great masterworks of Western Art.
The first chapter traces the development of images of the Creation and the Afterworld from descriptions of them in the Scriptures through their evolution in later literary and...